This is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighthcentury texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Analyzing historical records, poetry, fiction, religious writings, military epics, political treatises, and textual commentary, Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths. Felt demonstrates that the meanings of Japanese antiquity and of Japan's most ancient texts were - and are - a work in progress, a collective effort of writers and thinkers over the past 1,300 years.